by Mick Herron
But River stayed where he was for the moment, sheltering under the awning of the nearest shop, in whose window a gallimaufry of objects was on display: kitchen gadgets, children’s toys, radios, watches, toiletries, brushes, packets of seed, boxes of cat litter, as if the idea was to just chuck a lot of bait around and see what the net dragged in. It reminded him of the market-stalls on a street near Slough House, most of which had vanished when the foodies moved in. Random thoughts like this were the product of weariness. He surveyed the goods on offer while he accustomed himself to being here, middle of France, with only half a clue as to what he was doing.
It felt earlier than it was, or perhaps later—the light, anyway, seemed wrong, as if filtered through gauze—but then, his body clock was still set to yesterday. River hadn’t had much sleep last night, and didn’t have much money. Adam Lockhead’s euros had paid for a train ticket from Paris to Poitiers and the bus ticket here from there, but weren’t going to get him much further. They didn’t have to, though. By lunchtime at the outside, the body at his grandfather’s would have been, if not identified as Lockhead, at least unidentified as River Cartwright, which meant using his credit card wouldn’t be giving away anything that wasn’t already known, other than his location. They’d be looking at his known associates by then, trying to find the old man. With luck, by the time they got to Catherine, he’d have discovered what had brought an assassin from this quiet-seeming town on the river Anglin all the way to his grandfather’s house in Kent. Because the last thing he wanted was for the O.B. to be in anyone’s custody—not the Park’s; not the police’s—until he knew where the danger was coming from. Until then it was all joe country, and everyone a potential enemy.
Nobody had left or entered the café while he’d been standing here, and even if they had, what would he have done about it? It was time to take the next step. Collar up against the rain, he left the shelter of the awning, and made for Le Ciel Bleu.
She favoured park benches for off-the-books meetings—park benches or shady riverside stretches she was confident were unmonitored, but it was good to mix it up. So she’d told Claude to get out of the car and walk, to wait on the north-east corner of Oxford Circus. There were always crowds there, a good spot to check him for back-up. Maybe she didn’t have field savvy—running Ops was a desk job—but you didn’t have to know how to strip an engine to drive a car, and Claude Whelan had no clue how near she was until she put a hand on his elbow—almost.
He turned at the last moment. “Diana.”
“Sorry about the cloak and dagger.”
“No you’re not.”
“But some conversations are best kept out of the headlines.”
He was alone. His driver was still in a traffic jam, and tensions had to be running high before First Desk warranted an armed escort.
“What are you up to, Diana?”
“I want to catch a bus. This one will do.”
A bus ride up Oxford Street was a lengthy business at the best of times, and late morning wasn’t one of them. She paid cash, so there’d be no Oyster-card record, and they sat upstairs at the back like teenagers, except they weren’t texting. Whelan wore an amused expression, to cover whatever forebodings Taverner’s phone call had summoned, and she allowed him a minute to get used to where they were, assuming correctly that he hadn’t been on a bus in some time.
He’d noticed the flickering monitor on the lower deck. “You do realise there’s CCTV.”
“Which will be wiped tomorrow morning, provided no intervening event requires otherwise.”
“Well, let’s try to make sure that doesn’t happen. What’s going on, Diana?”
“We have a problem, Claude.”
“We do?”
“Well, technically you do. It seems you’ve supplied misinformation to a COBRA meeting. I don’t think that counts as actual treason, but—”
“Misinformation?”
“—it almost certainly amounts to dereliction of duty, and not in a small way, either. How long have you been in office now?”
“How long have I—Diana, what’s going on?”
“I’m just wondering if it’s a record, that’s all. Shortest serving First Desk.”
He said, “One of two things is going to happen. Either you start making sense, or I’m getting off this bus. And if it’s the latter, then the moment I’m back at the Park, I’ll be issuing a suspension notice. Have I made myself clear?”
“Crystal. What did you tell them about Winters?”
“You know what I told them about Winters. That we have his passport, for God’s sake. And that we’re ninety-nine per cent certain it’s the genuine article, which means it’s the key to unlocking everything else about him.”
“Yes, you see, that’s rather the problem.”
“What is?”
“Robert Winters’s passport.”
A bus going in the opposite direction jerked to a halt, and for a moment Whelan was looking past Taverner at another pair, another man and woman, sitting on a different top deck, heading somewhere else. Whoever they were—clandestine lovers, bored professionals—for a second he wished he were part of their conspiracy instead of this one. “What are you saying?” He hissed the words, his vehemence causing the nearest other passenger, a man four seats in front, to turn.
“Oh darling, don’t be like that,” Diana cooed, and the man smirked as he looked away. Lovers’ spat. Well, sometimes they did.
It occurred to Whelan that one reason she wanted this conversation to take place on a bus was to lessen the possibility he might strangle her.
She said, “Robert Winters—he’s one of ours.”
“He was an agent?”
“Not exactly.”
“An asset? Jesus—”
“Not an asset either. He’s what they call a cold body. You’re familiar with the term?”
“Stop spinning this out. Tell me what you know.”
So she did.
This triangulation shit, the way Marcus explained it, was pretty basic, and had Shirley never attended a standard training session? She probably had a head cold that day, she explained. Since “head cold” was accepted code for “cocaine hangover,” Marcus acknowledged the likelihood of this. So anyway, this triangulation shit:
“You’ve got two pieces of information, you can draw a straight line between them, no more. You’ve got three—”
“Okay, yeah, I get it.”
“—you can pinpoint—”
“I said I get it, okay?”
“Now you get it. A minute ago you knew nothing.”
“Yeah, well, I remembered.”
Marcus felt like saying more, but there was no sense poking a stick at Shirley when you didn’t need to. Any given day, the odds on her going postal were marginally in favour, and if she’d calmed down lately, that wasn’t—Marcus figured—on account of anything in particular getting better, but just things not getting appreciably worse. Everyone drew a line somewhere. And maybe the AFMs were helping. In fact, now he thought about it, it had been a while since she’d—
“Christ on a fucking pedalo!”
Okay. Maybe not that long.
He said, “What now?”
“Password’s expired.”
The Service network required a new password every month, for security reasons, though since you could only register a new password by first entering your old one, there were those who questioned the value of this procedure. Shirley was among their number.
“What you looking for?” Marcus asked, as Shirley went through the process of acquiring a new login, which took up some nineteen seconds of her precious bloody time, as she dubbed it under her breath.
“Phone number.”
“Bit early for Chicken Shack.”
“It’s never too early for Chicken Shack,” said Shirley. “Besides
, fuck off. This is work.”
Logged in, she accessed the internal phone directory: everyone you might need to contact, at the Park and all other Service outposts—except Slough House. Nobody needed to contact Slough House.
Marcus was curious now, but didn’t want to ask. Shirley took pity. “Molly Doran,” she said.
“The wheelchair wonder?”
“Well, I think of her as the legless legend, but basically, yeah, we’re thinking of the same person.”
“Impression I got, she was pretty sick of Slough House. Didn’t River try to nick one of her files?”
“News flash. I’m not River.”
“You’re a slow horse, though.”
Shirley shrugged. “She’s a walking history book. She’ll either know something or not. And tell me or not. Only one way to find out.”
She dialled the number.
The café smelt of coffee and grilled cheese, and the faded pictures on the walls were of girls in rural costumes, with mill-and-cornfield backgrounds. A flyer for a circus had been taped to the door, alongside a coatstand, heavy with damp clothing. To River’s right was a glass-topped counter whose interior displayed pastries and sandwiches; most of the rest of the floorspace was occupied by chairs and tables, except for immediately in front of the counter, where a child’s buggy was parked. Its usual occupant sat in a high chair, slapping the tray with one hand, tugging an ear with the other, and gurgling as his/her—its—mother spooned into it a confection which was luridly green enough to look radioactive, though presumably wasn’t. The woman glanced River’s way, registered that the buggy was blocking his passage, and turned back to her child. River, offering a Gallic shrug, shifted the buggy enough to get past, then sat at a table against the far wall.
It wasn’t quite full. Mother and infant aside, there were only four others; a man in his fifties, with neat beard and pencil-thin eyebrows, reading a paper, and three young men sprawling round an array of cups and crumb-riddled plates and mobile phones. One watched River with open curiosity. The man with the newspaper didn’t look his way at all. An amiable woman, a little plump, appeared through a bead-curtained door behind the counter, and plucked a notepad from a shelf as she made her way towards River, pausing en route to cluck over the infant.
“Monsieur?” she said.
River ordered coffee.
He sat with it for half an hour. The three young men left in a noisy dazzle of endearments for the waitress; two girls came in and chattered ceaselessly over toasted sandwiches. River’s stomach growled, but he had barely enough cash for the coffee. The newspaper reader was brought another plate: an omelette, with mushrooms folded into it, judging by the smell. The coffee was good, but nowhere near filling. He examined the receipt once more: it was from five days previously, on the old side of the New Year, and Adam Lockhead had enjoyed two bottled beers and a steak-frites. The slip of paper had been crumpled into a ball, a forgotten piece of pocket detritus rather than deliberately retained for expenses; the distinction, in River’s mind, meaning that trips to Le Ciel Bleu had been regular, ordinary experiences for Adam Lockhead. Meaning that people here would recognise him; would know where he was staying, who his associates were . . . That, anyway, was what River had been telling himself for twelve hours or more. But it was starting to feel tenuous, here at this end of the argument, and not for the first time in his life, he wondered whether his initial instincts might have borne more rigorous inspection.
And would he have got this far, if not for that physical similarity, that coincidence of height and colouring? But then, he told himself, how many different colours did pairs of eyes come in? How many shades of fair did hair possess? Besides, the coincidence wasn’t that he looked like Lockhead; it was that Lockhead looked like him. That was the only reason Lockhead had managed to talk himself through the O.B.’s door; was maybe—probably—the reason he’d been chosen for the job in the first place.
The glances the waitress was giving him were gathering force. He’d possibly outstayed a single cup of coffee.
River nodded at her, and she was on him like a flash.
“Madame,” he began, then noticed she wore no wedding ring, but it was too late to back down now. “Je cherche un ami, un gens Anglais?”
She waited.
“Il . . . ” His French dried up. Looks like me? Resembles me? He found he was waving an open palm in front of his own face, illustrating a sentence he couldn’t create. Bond never had this trouble. Bond, though, would have been talking to a waitress twenty years younger, with inviting cleavage.
She was speaking now, words that included “man” and “breakfast,” and might have been a response to his half-arsed enquiries, or just a pithy French saw about the most important meal of the day.
When she paused, he said, “Il habite pres d’ici, je pense.”
His tense was all wrong, but that didn’t matter. Even if his French were perfect, he’d not be getting into Lockhead’s extinct status. But either way, the look on the woman’s face was one of total incomprehension.
A sudden rattle of syllables to his right interrupted the moment.
It was the bearded man, who had laid his paper down and was speaking to the waitress. There are few things more galling than to have one’s efforts at a foreign language require translation into the same, but it seemed to have the desired effect, for the woman simply left a saucer in front of River, on which lay the bill for his coffee, and retreated behind the counter.
“You are looking for a friend, I think,” the man said, in English.
“Yes,” River said, before the possible ambiguity of this approach had sunk in. “He—”
“He looks like you, yes?”
“You know him?”
“An Englishman?”
“Yes.”
The man shook his head. “Not English.”
“You’re sure?”
“He is a local. Bertrand, I think. Bertrand something.”
“And he comes in here?”
“I have seen him in here.” The man pointed to his eyes, then at River’s. “You share . . . You have the same expression. Am I saying that correctly?”
“Uh-huh. I mean yes. Oui. Do you know where he lives?”
“He is a friend? Or a relative?”
“A cousin,” River said.
“But you do not know his name. Or his nationality. Or where he lives.”
“We’re not a close family,” River said.
“Évidemment. I think he was from Les Arbres.”
“Is that another village?”
“A house. A big one. Not so far away.”
“Is it easy to find?”
“Well,” his new friend said. “Yes and no.”
“I remember you, yes,” Molly Doran told Shirley Dander over the phone.
“That’s good.”
“How very confident of you to think so.”
“. . . Sorry?”
“Don’t mention it. What is it you’re after this time, Ms. Dander? Or rather, what is it Jackson’s after? I assume you’re calling on his behalf.”
“I’m more what you’d call using my initiative.”
“What a nice way of putting it. So exploiting my expertise becomes your achievement, is that how it works?”
Shirley suppressed a sigh. Suppressing sighs was actually quite high on the list of personal goals drawn up at her AFM sessions, so it was like she was ticking a box at the same time. “How are things with you?” she asked, remembering another target: be aware of other people’s issues.
This attempt at heightened awareness met with stupefied silence.
Molly Doran wasn’t quite a Service legend, but she was heading that way. Molly ran personnel records at the Park: she trundled round in a bright red wheelchair on account of having lost her legs way back at the dawn of time, and knew everyth
ing, which made her a useful source of information. Every year, she gave a lecture on the Service’s research resources to baby spooks: a one-off class which had been known to reduce the intake’s hardest customer to a bubbling jelly. Even Lamb was rumoured to be impressed. Shirley, in fact, had heard a myth that Lamb and Molly shared history, which was kind of mind-numbing.
And now, Shirley’s polite enquiry comprehensively ignored, it was Molly’s turn to speak. “I gather Mr. Coe is now among your number.”
It took Shirley a moment to put the name Coe together with the hooded menace upstairs. “You know him?”
“I seem to recall sending him Jackson’s way once.” She paused. “If I’d known he was to end up there permanently, I might not have done that.”
A semblance of regret, there, or a passable pretence of the same. Shirley decided to treat this as an opening. “You know old David Cartwright?” she asked.
The brief silence that greeted this was precisely the amount of time it took to roll a pair of eyes. “I may have come across the name.”
“Yeah, well, someone tried to whack him last night.”
This next silence was rather more profound.
“Someone . . . ”
“Whack him, yeah. Apparently.” She gave Marcus a thumbs-up. This was going well now.
“And that’s the reason you’re calling.”
“Kind of. See—”
“And might I ask why you insist on conducting your investigation over the phone instead of affording me the basic courtesy of calling round in person?”
“Seriously?”